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Andrzej Zulawski, Rebellious Film Director, Dies at 75

Andrzej Zulawski in 1985 with Sophie Marceau, who appeared in his films and with whom he had a long-term relationship.Credit
Ralph Gatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Andrzej Zulawski, a Polish director who blended surrealism, horror and psychic excess in the emotionally savage films “The Important Thing Is to Love,” “Possession” and “My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days,” died on Wednesday in Warsaw. He was 75.

Mr. Zulawski, known primarily to a small art-house and film festival audience, made no concessions to logic, ordinary human motivations or audience squeamishness in directing his overwrought films, for which French critics created the adjective Zulawskien, meaning over the top.

In “Possession” (1981), the only film by Mr. Zulawski to be released commercially in the United States, Isabelle Adjani played a woman who, as her marriage disintegrates, indulges in a mad affair with a squidlike creature that evolves into a simulacrum of her husband, played by Sam Neill. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, she throws herself against the walls of a metro underpass in West Berlin and convulses, with fluids oozing from every orifice.

The critic J. Hoberman, writing in The New York Times in 2012, described Mr. Zulawski as “an auteur to be approached with trepidation.” He added: “His movies are seldom more than a step from some flaming abyss, with his actors (and audience) trembling on the edge. Typically shot with a frenzied, often subjective moving camera in saturated colors that have the over-bright feel of a chemically induced hallucination, these can be hard to watch and harder to forget.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Zulawski tended to divide audiences. “A filmgoers either has the flesh-in-the-teeth lust for his emotional, visual and narrative pandemonium or they do not,” Michael Atkinson wrote in Film Comment in 2003, characterizing Mr. Zulawski as “a film festival scourge beloved for his violations.”

Mr. Zulawski remained unruffled by the critical turmoil his work engendered and sublimely indifferent to what he considered the shortcomings of audiences.

“To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema,” he once said, responding to criticisms of “Possession.” “As far as I’m concerned, I don’t make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence.”

Andrzej Zulawski (pronounced ahn-DRAY zhu-WOFF-skee) was born on Nov. 22, 1940, in Lwow, then part of Poland and now, known as Lviv, part of Ukraine. His father, Miroslaw, was a writer who fought with Polish resistance forces during World War II and later served as Poland’s representative to Unesco in Paris.

Mr. Zulawski studied film at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris while taking courses in political science at the Sorbonne. In 1960, returning to Poland, he became an assistant to the director Andrzej Wajda.

Photo

Isabelle Adjani in the 1981 film “Possession,” directed by Mr. Zulawski.Credit
Bleeding Light Film Group

After directing two short films for television, “Pavoncello” and “The Song of Triumphant Love,” he made his first feature-length film, “The Third Part of the Night” (1971). Based on a novel by his father, it dealt with the Nazi occupation of Poland, dramatized in lurid, nightmarish terms with few specific historical references.

He followed with “The Devil” (1972), a slaughter-fest set in the late 18th century, with an anti-royalist hero who embarks on a killing spree. Government censors blocked its release, and Mr. Zulawski was invited to leave Poland for France.

“The Important Thing Is to Love” (1975), about a passionate affair between a photographer and an actress reduced to appearing in sexploitation films, caught the attention of French critics and earned its star, Romy Schneider, a best actress César, the French equivalent of an Academy Award.

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Buoyed by the film’s success, Mr. Zulawski returned to Poland to make the film version of “The Moon Trilogy,” a work of science fiction by his great-uncle Jerzy Zulawski. Titled “On the Silver Globe” and mounted on an epic scale, it followed the adventures of marooned astronauts contending with telepathic humanoid birds, amphibious mud people and their own mutant descendants.

Polish censors halted production just as the film was nearing completion and ordered it destroyed. From rescued negatives, Mr. Zulawski cobbled together a new version, with a running time of more than two and a half hours, in the late 1980s when the political situation in Poland had changed.

While making “Mad Love” (1985), loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Idiot,” Mr. Zulawski fell in love with his star, Sophie Marceau, with whom he went on to have a long-term relationship and collaborate on three more films, “My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days” (1989), “The Blue Note” (1991) and “Fidelity” (2000). The couple separated in 2001. Mr. Zulawski is survived by their son, Vincent; a son from his first marriage, Xawery, who is also a filmmaker; and a third son, Ignacy.

Mr. Zulawski abstained from cinema for 15 years before making “Cosmos” (2015), based on a novella by Witold Gombrowicz, with yet another top-list actress, Sabine Azéma, in the starring role. Sometimes described as a metaphysical noir thriller, it tells the story of two friends who become fixated on a young woman and a maid at a country inn run by a retired couple.

Mr. Zulawski wrote several novels as well as two memoirs about his breakup with Ms. Marceau, “About Her” and “Infidelity,” both published in 2003.

In 2012, the Brooklyn Academy of Music showed 12 of his films in a retrospective in its BAMcinématek series. On Friday and Saturday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, as part of the series Film Comment Selects, plans to show four of Mr. Zulawski’s films: “The Third Part of the Night,” “The Devil,” “On the Silver Globe” and “Cosmos.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 18, 2016, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Andrzej Zulawski Is Dead; Rebellious Director Was 75. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe